


The Republic of Heaven

by maximumfudanshi



Category: MEJIBRAY, VanessA (Band)
Genre: Drug Use, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 15:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6476185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maximumfudanshi/pseuds/maximumfudanshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Koichi had never done anything like this before, had never been as wild and reckless as Genki. Or maybe he was just a different kind of wild. But right now, he felt on top of the world. He felt like he could ascend to the heavens under his own power and kick god’s ass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Republic of Heaven

Outside the livehouse, Koichi stood on wobbly legs, sweat cooling in the hazy night air. He watched his bandmates load the last of their equipment into their nasty, broken-down van and thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He turned his face up to the pinkish indigo of the sky. Maybe that was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen? There was nothing to look at in the eternal twilight above the glowing city, but his mind was a million miles away anyway. Spots still danced across his vision from the harsh stage lights, and his hand were too shaky to try to hold the cigarette he wanted.

But he’d never been more happy, had never thought it was even possible to be this happy. Vanessa had just played their first real oneman, their first show that wasn’t in a total shithole of a club, and the audience had been much bigger than they had expected. Everything had gone off without a hitch. He was exhausted, but if their manager came out and asked them to play another set, he’d gladly do it all over again. It felt like they had made it, like they had won.

“You good man?” Genki was staring at him as he stood with his face upturned, looking past the sky. 

“Yeah. I’m fucking excellent. I feel like I could ascend to the heavens and kick god’s ass right now,” he voiced his absurd thoughts, too tired to make more sense, hopeful that his bandmate would get what he meant.

In response, Genki only clapped a hand on his shoulder and drew him into a warm one armed embrace, grinning. “Well, I was going to ask you to come over for drinks, but it seems like you’re pretty far out already.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, “That was pretty amazing. I don’t want to risk forgetting any of it. I could use a smoke though.” When Genki released him he knelt down on the pavement and tried to light up.

The vocalist knelt beside him and helped steady his hands, took the lighter and did it for him when his first two tries fumbled. When he finally took the cigarette from his lips after a few long drags, Genki grabbed it and helped himself. When he finally passed it back, Koichi saw it was a mess of red and pink lipstick. Oh well.

“Well, you can still come over and... Ever smoked hookah?”

“You bought a hookah?” Koichi stood up and brushed himself off, a little more grounded with some nicotine in his system. He had changed back into his street clothes, sweaty vinyl packed away onto a garment rack in the back of the van, but he still felt kind of gross. 

His friend saw his hesitation, “C’mon, I want to celebrate. You know you’re not going to be able to sleep even if you go home.”

“All right, but you have to let me use your shower.”

“Deal.” Genki was already leading him toward the van where the others were smoking, laughing, vibrating with energy and pride.

\----------

Even though Toki did his best to take the shortest, most efficient route, dropping them all off would take him close to an hour before he could take the van back to be squeezed into the tiny parking spot that came with his apartment. Koichi settled into the backseat, Genki beside him, and let his eyes close for a while. Genki probably wanted to talk, but he’d have to wait a few minutes while the overwhelming memory of the crowd replayed behind his eyelids. Twenty minutes later he heard Haruki climbing out of the front seat, and Genki leaned forward to tell Toki, “You can skip Koichi’s stop.”

“Do I even want to know?”

Koichi raised his middle finger without opening his eyes, and Genki laughed, “We’re just going to smoke and talk about that greasy looking girl who was staring so hard at you. I thought she was going to throw her panties or something.”

“Ugh,” Toki put the van back in drive and headed for Genki’s place. He should have known that any teasing he tried would always come back to bite him in the ass, but he was still glad to shorten his journey by one stop.

Koichi watched the streetlights flash past until they pulled up at the curb in front of the apartment block. While Genki leaned against the open window and congratulated Toki again, he grabbed his bass from the back of the van. Amps might be more expensive, but they felt more replaceable. His bass, though… he couldn’t stand the thought of anything happening to his baby, accidentally left in an unlocked car. He always took it with him, since he knew he’d want to play anyway. He waved goodnight to Toki and fell in step beside Genki as they climbed the rusty staircase to the third floor.

\----------

When he came out of the shower, he found a pair of pajama pants sitting folded on the edge of the sink.  
Good, he wouldn’t have to put his old clothes on again. When he went out to the main room, Genki was sitting cross legged on his mattress on the floor, messing with something on the low table in front of him.

“I suppose it would have been too much to ask for you to bring me a shirt too?”

“Wow, lower your expectations,” he scolded without looking up. “But trust me, you’re not going to want one, A/C’s been broken for like a month.” 

Koichi noticed then that Genki had stripped out of his own shirt and opened the window, letting the tepid night air stir the heavy black-out curtains. He sat down on the mattress, their knees just touching, and tried to make sense of what his friend was doing.

“So. How, exactly, does one hookah?” he prodded, eyeing the tall glass thing trailing a hose across the table like some kind of scifi sex toy. But Genki wasn’t doing anything with it yet, instead opening a box of rolling papers. “You have to roll it first?”

“No, no. Change of plans. Mere hookah is not worthy of tonight’s success.”

He leaned forward then, watching, and caught a whiff of something that was decidedly not tobacco. A smell that brought back nearly lost memories of some seedy high-school party in a dark basement, waving away a joint in favor of beer, thinking better the devil he knew than the one he didn’t.

He said nothing as Genki rolled the joint, but his skepticism must have shown plainly, because when Genki finished and held it up for his approval a long look passed between them, challenges and questions on both sides.

“You said you wanted to ascend to the heavens,” smiling expectantly, indulgently, Genki waited a moment for his response.

“Oh, fuck it,” he snatched the proffered joint, held it as his bandmate lit it, and then hesitated, wondering if he was about to make a fool of himself.

“Don’t tell me you’ve really never smoked a joint? Same as a cigarette, just don’t exhale too quickly.”

He took a deep drag, held it, waited for whatever was coming. Genki took the joint from his fingers and took a hit as Koichi leaned back against the wall, beginning to feel something bizarre after a long moment. His arms felt just a little longer than they had been a second ago, difficult to control as he took another hit. Whatever was going on, he liked it. 

“How are you doing in there?” Genki was grinning, waving a hand in front of his face, still apparently in control of his own arms.

“I seem to be having trouble staying attached to the floor,” he laughed. He was only an inch off the ground, but he held onto the bed sheets to keep from going any higher. 

“I think you better slow down.” They were both laughing then, and Koichi felt the stars tugging at him, somewhere beyond their shroud of smog.

“This would be a very slow way to get all the way to heaven though, unless the effect is non-linear,” he giggled. 

“You don’t need to go anywhere else though.” Genki laid his head in Koichi’s lap, weighing him down. He watched for a moment as Koichi dreamed, before continuing softly, “Where we are is always the most important place. We have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us, there is nowhere else.”

He said it deliberately, and somehow Koichi thought it sounded as if he was quoting something, some bit of philosophy. But he didn’t recognize it from any of what he’d read. Maybe it was French instead of his preferred German philosophy. French revolutionary republicanism? Since when did Genki read philosophy?

He was too far away from anywhere else to remember anything like that, intellectual thought branching quickly into fractal absurdities. He was a million miles away, yet right next to Genki, skin to skin, at the same time. The touch of a bare shoulder to his stomach brought back the vivid memory of Genki’s warmth pressed against him on stage, the kiss he’d pressed to the corner of his mouth between songs, pulling back to grin victoriously at him.

Another toke, ten minutes or an hour later, and he began to feel that he understood. That was what they were doing. Not just right now, getting high impulsively, but with their whole lives, their whole beings. They were trying to build heaven for themselves, right where they were. Living for their own reasons, fighting tooth and nail not to lose themselves to the relentless tide of directionless men in silk nooses. 

And right now, it felt like they were succeeding. The warm, smoky apartment, the peeling paint, the bit of living fire he held in his hands; this was the republic of heaven. As long as he and Genki were their own masters, they were their own gods. No one else mattered, and he would let disapproval and condemnation wash over him and come out stronger on the other side of it. 

He wanted to look through the ceiling, past the night sky again, but Genki was smiling, reaching up to take the joint back. He had done a shitty job of washing his makeup off at the kitchen sink, still leaving pink marks wherever his lips touched. Koichi watched him smoke the last of the joint, the embers dangerously close to his fingers, then stub it out in an ashtray crowded with ordinary cigarette butts.

“I kind of feel like calling my old boss and telling him to go fuck himself,” he found himself confessing as Genki rolled over and pressed his face against his stomach, tickling him with blonde hair as he hid from the light for a moment.

“The ‘Don’t come to me begging for you job back’ guy?” came the answer, murmured warm against his skin.

“That asshole.”

“Don’t waste your time on him.” 

Genki turned his face up again and Koichi saw that he had left more of those pale lipstick smudges on his stomach. He laughed and rubbed them away as his bandmate sat up. He felt a heavy gaze on him as he thought again about the kiss on stage, the force of it- not sexual, but passionate, reckless. And then a hand was pulling his wrist away from his stomach, pulling him to look up at Genki kneeling in front of him. There was a shimmering web stung between him, something he felt more than saw. At first he wanted to brush it away like a cobweb, but it was too beautiful. Was it a network of silvery neurons, connecting their minds? Was that how he knew that the other was thinking of the same things?

Genki leaned in to kiss him, and he wasn’t the least bit surprised. It seemed like everything, all the forces great and small, from the ponderous condensation of nebulas to the split-second bonds of atoms, had always been pushing them inexorably toward this. He felt himself floating away again as their lips met, wrapped his arms around Genki’s neck and held on.

“You don’t need to go anywhere else. Just be here in heaven with me.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is, but you can't convince me those guys don't hit a blunt on occasion, especially considering they hang out with akkey suwa.  
> uuuh, the reference is to phillip pulman's 'his dark materials', which strongly shaped my worldview growing up. if you haven't read it, you should go read it now, and think about what the republic of heaven means to you??? heavy stuff.


End file.
